Education and Voting Conservative: Evidencefromamajorschoolingreformin Great Britain

EDUCATION AND VOTING CONSERVATIVE: EVIDENCE FROM A MAJOR SCHOOLING REFORM IN GREAT BRITAIN JOHN MARSHALL∗ FEBRUARY 2015 High school education is central to adolescent socialization, but also has important downstream consequences for adult life. However, scholars examining schooling’s political effects have struggled to reconcile education’s correlation with both more liberal social attitudes and greater income. To disentangle this relationship, I exploit a major school leaving age reform in Great Britain that caused almost half the population to remain at high school for at least an additional year. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity design, I find that each additional year of late high school increases the probability of voting Conservative in later life by 12 percentage points. A similar relationship holds away from the discontinuity, suggesting that education is a key determinant of voting behavior and that the reform could have significantly altered electoral outcomes. I provide evidence suggesting that, by increasing an individual’s income, education increases support for right-wing economic policies, and ultimately the Conservative party. ∗PhD candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University. [email protected]. I thank Jim Alt, Charlotte Cavaille, Andy Hall, Torben Iversen, Horacio Larreguy, Brandon Stewart, and Tess Wise for illuminating discussions and useful comments. 1 1 Introduction High school is a defining feature of an individual’s adolescence and has been linked to radically different life trajectories. Such education may permanently instill social and political attitudes, determine labor market prospects, or affect the composition of an individual’s social network. Consequently, it has the potential to substantially alter a voter’s political preferences and voting behavior in later life, and in turn impact electoral and policy outcomes. However, despite considerable interest in education’s effect on political participation (see Sond- heimer and Green 2010), strikingly little is known about education’s effect on the party an individual votes for. Existing survey evidence, which has struggled to square the widely-documented correlations between income (which education increases) and support for conservative economic policies (e.g. Clarke et al. 2004; Gelman et al. 2010) and between education and socially liberal attitudes (e.g. Converse 1972; Nie, Junn and Stehlik-Barry 1996; Gerber et al. 2010), has failed to disentangle either the direction of the relationship or its mechanisms. In part, this reflects major empirical challenges stemming from the fact that better educated individuals differ substantially in other important respects and that education is itself a cause of many variables that researchers often control for. Furthermore, because the direct link to vote choice has received limited attention, it is also possible that education affects attitudes without impacting vote choices. In this article, I leverage a major educational reform to identify the effects of high school education on downstream voting behavior in Great Britain. In 1944, Winston Churchill’s cross- party coalition government pass legislation raising the high school leaving age from 14 to 15. The reform, which came into effect in 1947, induced almost half the student population to remain in school for either one or two additional years (but did not affect tertiary education progression). The magnitude of Britain’s 1947 reform marks it apart from leaving age reforms in North America and Europe (see Brunello, Fort and Weber 2009; Oreopoulos 2006), and experimental studies providing unrepresentative participants with incentives to remain in school (Sondheimer and Green 2010). 2 It therefore represents a unique opportunity to estimate education’s political effects for the lower half of the education distribution. I use a regression discontinuity (RD) design to compare voters from cohorts just old enough to be affected by the reform to voters from cohorts just young enough not to have been affected. I first identify the effect of the 1947 reform on the probability of voting for the Conservative party—Britain’s most prominent economically conservative party. Given that some students would have remained in school regardless of the higher leaving age, I then use the 1947 reform to instrument for schooling in order to identify the effect of an additional year of late high school for students that only remained in school because of the reform. The results show that staying in high school substantially increases the likelihood that an individual votes for the Conservative party in later life. In particular, I find that each additional year of high school increases the probability of voting Conservative by nearly 12 percentage points. For cohorts affected by the reform, this translates into a 4.4 percentage point increase in the Con- servative vote share. Although the RD estimates are local to the cohorts aged 14 around 1947, a correlation of similar magnitude holds between completing late high school and voting behavior across all cohorts. This supports the external validity of this finding, and suggests that completing high school is a key point at which education affects political preferences. Furthermore, the fact that a similar correlation holds away from the discontinuity implies that Britain’s 1947 reform changed the dynamics of national politics, and could have altered the outcomes of the close 1970 and 1992 Conservative election victories. Future educational reforms thus pose an important “catch 22” for the Labour and Liberal parties, who are ideologically committed to expanding educational opportunities for the least educated but also face an electoral cost of such policies. Beyond demonstrating that education causes voters to support the Conservative party, I provide evidence suggesting that education’s effects operate according to a Meltzer and Richard(1981) dis- tributive logic. By increasing an individual’s income, education increases support for right-wing economic policies, which in turn leads individuals to vote Conservative. I provide a variety of evidence consistent with this mechanism. First, education significantly increases a student’s fu- 3 ture income (see Devereux and Hart 2010; Harmon and Walker 1995; Oreopoulos 2006), and only increases Conservative voting before retirement age. Second, and consistent with a permanent increase in income, an individual’s greater support for the Conservatives is relatively durable: an additional year of schooling causes individuals to self-identify as partisans, and increases the likelihood that they decided how they would vote before the start of the electoral campaign. Third, education increases support for economic policies associated with the Conservative party, includ- ing opposition to higher taxes, redistribution and welfare spending. Fourth, to demonstrate that educated individuals vote Conservative because of their policies, rather than the reverse relationship where voters simply adopt the positions of the party they identify with, I show that education does not affect support for non-economic positions associated with the Conservative party. Finally, I find no evidence that voters become more socially liberal or are impacted by more politically en- gaged social networks. This article proceeds as follows. I first consider the theoretical mechanisms potentially linking schooling and vote choice. I then describe Britain’s 1947 leaving age reform, the data and iden- tification strategy. The next section presents the main results. The penultimate section examines the mechanisms linking high school to voting Conservative. I then conclude by considering the implications of the results. 2 Why might high school education affect political preferences? Arguably the most obvious channel through which education might affect political preferences is through an individual’s labor market position. An influential human capital literature argues that education imparts valuable skills that make workers more productive employees for firms (Becker 1964). These skills are generally rewarded in terms of higher wages (e.g. Angrist and Krueger 1991; Ashenfelter and Rouse 1998; Oreopoulos 2009). Linking education to political preferences, Romer(1975) and Meltzer and Richard(1981) (henceforth RMR) argue that workers 4 receiving higher wages will prefer lower income tax rates and lower government spending, particularly on means-tested programs, because they are net losers when tax revenues are progressively redistributed. Similar arguments may also apply to expected income, such that voters support conservative policies in anticipation of their higher future income (Alesina and La Ferrara 2005). In the British context, the human capital and RMR models imply that, by increasing their income, greater education should cause voters to become more favorable toward the Conservative party, and particularly the party’s relatively fiscally conservative platform. However, a more sociological literature has instead suggested that education cultivates socially liberal attitudes. Lipset(1959) famously proposed that education socializes liberal attitudes by directly communicating support for toleration and democracy. Hyman and Wright(1979) go fur- ther, arguing that—by expanding their frames of reference—education causes students to think in a fundamentally more liberal fashion. Furthermore, the final years of high school may also be a particularly important moment in the crystallization

Load more